Awards and Recommendations
Leadtek Winfast A280 LE TDH - This card seems to have all the bases covered and is relatively cheap to boot. At £135 or so it's extremely quiet, pays due attention to ad-hoc cooling via a massive heatsink, comes with truly useful VIVO leads, breakout box. It also has some of the best software in terms of games and utilities of any bundle. The fact that it's widely available right now counts for a lot too. Our sample overclocked well. An excellent buy.
Gainward GeForce4™ PowerPack! Ultra/750-8X XP "Golden Sample" - It may be a little on the expensive side, but it does include some truly value-adding extras. The tiny BGA RAM overclocks well. It's extremely well made and on every front. The Firewire card is almost a must for those that are serious about digital transfer. It comes with the latest Philips encoder/decoder and the whole package just screams quality. This card represents excellent value for money. A complete Firewire kit can cost you £40+, so the asking price isn't too steep.
MSI 128MB Ti 4200 8x VIVO - Another card that can do it all, is easily available, comes with a myriad of extras, and is relative quiet in operation. Whilst not setting our world on fire with its overclocking exploits, it's a package that gives you a lot for your pound.
Best Performance and Technical Innvoation
The 128MB 4x AGP Albatron Ti4200P TURBO card have proven to be consistant over recent months, sure we have seen some performance in this article which we would not normally see - for example the Creative card overclocking very high. This is down to 1 card. If we got 10 or so Albatrons we are pretty sure we would see the same results we have seen here. They have put thought in to the card with the BGA memory, the 8 layer PCB and the cooling system - they are lacking in the ViVO section and the bundle - i.e no DVI adapter. But for the money this card is a sure fire winner.
Best Value Card.
The ironic part with this is that the most expensive card has won this section - the Gainward GeForce4™ PowerPack! Ultra/750-8X XP "Golden Sample". This card is a high performance card with the best bundle we have seen, the glasses, the firewire. You may not need to have the bundled extras but for the slight cost increase it is worth it. It is a simple case of you get what you pay for.
Other cards deserve hearty mentions. The Creative card 'clocked like a bat out of hell - a card that's available for under £100. The 64MB of RAM didn't seem to hinder it too much in our benchmarks.
I would also like to praise the ABIT OTES card for being daring in their default speeds. The 275/553 clocks are Ti 4400 speeds. No other manufacturer here, no matter how much attention they have applied to cooling, feel confident enough to raise their Ti 4200's GPU frequency above default. ABIT go a whole 25MHz over stock. Commendable. If you want the fastest default Ti 4200 here, the choice is simple. Just make sure that noise, or lack of it, doesn't feature too highly in your list of priorities.
In fact, there was no bad card
in this roundup. Each card could be the one for you depending on which
attributes you rate most highly. Some are more difficult to get hold of
than others, but based on a proven GPU and driver catalogue, each will
sell.
A Word of Thanks
To conduct such an article we needed support from many companies. We would like to thank the manufacturers for submitting their cards. We would also like to thank MSI and VIA for the provision of the motherboard to test on. Paul Dutton at [OCS] for the provision of the XP2700+ and help with the article. Finally a thanks to Adam Foat and Andrew Humber at NVIDIA.
As I know we will be inundated with emails on where to pickup some of the cards. We have put together some buy links
Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/650-8X XP "Golden Sample"
Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750-8X XP "Golden Sample"
ABIT Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8X OTES
Albatron TI 4200P Turbo+
